“[H]e brought into his government, when he came back to power late last year, the most extreme, I mean, this is beyond fascism, the most extreme parties in Israel. The religious Zionists and the Jewish power. I mean, these people are terrorists and some of them actually have been on the State Department terrorism watch list, not allowed in the United States in the past. And he brought them into the cabinet. He made one of these guys the minister of national security, put the other in the finance ministry and then gave him responsibilities as a civilian for overseeing the Palestinian West Bank. And both of these ministers who are extremists were also squatters on Palestinian land in the West Bank and wanted to steal the rest of it to bring in more settlers.”
Historian Juan Cole minces no words in offering a grave and sobering account of the conflict in Palestine and Israel on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast. In a comprehensive reflection of the history and current day situation in the Middle East, Cole uses his expertise as one of the leading historians of the region to paint a picture of the war. He asserts that in all definitions of the words, Israel is actively committing war crimes, like the United States in Iraq, a genocide and ethnic cleansing aimed at eliminating the Palestinian presence from their homeland.
Cole’s characterization of Netanyahu and his government as fascist immediately brings up the gross complicity at the hands of the U.S. and the politicians who have supported and continue to publicly stand by Israel. It’s worse when considering the high-ranking officials in Netanyahu’s cabinet.
It was not hard to see the irony in the Western response, as Scheer points out: “The hypocrisy of Germany, which was the author of the worst crime of modern history, the Holocaust, and the French, who certainly were anti-Semitic to a considerable degree, and others in Western Europe, [are] now saying you can’t even demonstrate for Palestinian rights.”
Pointing out the individuals with a real hand in the situation, who have the money to lobby for Israel’s interests, Cole says, “[the power] lies with the people that are most comfortable with seeing the Palestinians simply ethnically cleansed.”
Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest, and I say that every week but wow, this week it’s really true. You know, Juan Cole, I’m accused of giving too long introductions so I’m not going to do that, but this is the leading, I was going to say, academic expert on the Middle East, but the leading expert, period, end of sentence, at least in the United States, they probably got some sharper people in Spain and Italy. But I’ve known this guy for a long time. He came out of UCLA, studied under the great Nikki Keddie, who knew a lot about Iran when people didn’t want to know about Iran. He’s Arabic, fluent and all that. And what I really loved all these years, no matter what was happening, you were always calm and judicious and you really unravel complex things.
My favorite book of yours is on Muhammad, around the prophet of Muhammad and connecting what is known of his life as a trader to his own views and openness. And it’s a great demystifying book. But however, as a measure of how horrible things are in this region that you have covered, I read your article today and it was a different Juan Cole, you know, it was distributed by TomDispatch. It’s on your own Informed Comment site. We have it on ScheerPost. I hope everybody carries it. But you referred to Netanyahu as a fascist. And that was so… I don’t know it, it caught me, so explain it. Explain what you think is really going on there now. Well.
Juan Cole: Binyamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister of Israel, has throughout his political career, you know, acted as a pragmatist to some extent, and he’s made alliances with the center, even the left. But his political tradition, the intellectual background of his thinking in the Likud Party, which is the ruling party in Israel now really does have a fascist philosophical grounding. And it goes back to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, originally, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who was writing in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s , and who put forth this theory that, you know, the European Jews in Palestine, in British mandate Palestine, were colonizers and that the Arab population would never accept their colonizing Palestinian land, and that the only thing that one could do is to form an iron wall of militiamen essentially, and beat up the Arabs. And if they give you any guff, crush them. And eventually, when they saw that they couldn’t defeat the Zionist militias, they would maybe then grudgingly allow the Jews to have at least some part of Palestine.
That was Jabotinsky’s theory, and it became the bedrock of the Likud Party of the Betar Youth League. And it, you know, it gave rise because of the nature of the theory to some terrorism groups, terrorist groups, Irgun being the famous one which blew up the King David Hotel in 1946 in Jerusalem killing, I think, 96 people, including a lot of civilians, although it was targeted at British intelligence. And they, it was this group that shot up the village of Deir Yassin in 1948 with which other Jewish groups, the Haganah had made a kind of peace treaty. But the Irgun came in and just machine gunned these villagers down to encourage Palestinians to flee and ethnically cleansed, ethnically cleansed Palestine so that the Zionists could take it. And so that’s the background of the Likud Party. And in 1926, on the anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel, they held a celebration in Jerusalem commemorating this deed at which the British government was furious. And they issued a communique condemning Netanyahu and the Likud for celebrating this act of terrorism. So but, you know, it’s not actually not controversial to say that Netanyahu comes out of a fascist tradition….
https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/03/palestines-obituary/
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Israel’s Colonial Revenge Genocide in Gaza is the latest in a Long History of such Massacres
Chris Hedges: The Horror, The Horror
Patrick Lawrence: ‘The Hinge of History’
As Gaza War Wages On, Israeli Settlers Attack Palestinians and Create a New Reality in the West Bank
Do Palestinian lives matter to the world?
Chris Hedges: Letter to the Children of Gaza
Is it too much to ask people to view Palestinians as humans? Apparently so
Dogs of war / New acronym in Gaza: WCNSF – Wounded Child No Surviving Family
Patrick Lawrence: Deeper Into Depravity
A Conspiracy of Silence / The Killing Floor of Gaza
Michael Brenner: Europe-Jews-Muslims
After the truth-shower 